24th November 2010 Archive

Mobile handset manufacturer and Google pal HTC has announced a licensing deal that gives it access to the more than 30,000 patents owned by Intellectual Ventures (IV), the IP-gathering outfit founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.

If you want big server iron but you have midrange server budgets, Numascale has an adapter card that it wants to sell to you. The NumaConnect SMP card turns a cluster of Opteron servers into a shared memory system, and in the not-too-distant future, probably Xeon-based machines, too.

If you think candybar handsets should have touchscreens then Touch and Type should be right up your street. This is Nokia's attempt to breathe new life into the rusty trusty S40 platform by adapting it for a touchscreen interface. The first two T&T handsets to be released in the UK are the X3-02 and C3-01 and it's the former I have on my desk at the moment.

A council that accidentally faxed details of a child sex abuse case to a member of the public was fined £100,000 by the Information Commissioner today, in the first use of his new powers to punish data breaches.

Grumbling taxpayers concerned that much so-called academic "research" actually consists of boffins basically mucking about at public expense can calm down. Today brings news of university researchers maintaining a laser-like focus and toiling hard on projects which deliver immediate and obvious betterment to a suffering humanity.

Welcome to the first part of our trilogy of Christmas 2010 goodies. Over the next few weeks we'll have up to 40 per cent savings on a range of books from Smartphones to Lego, Cameras to The Godfather, and even Cheese. Cracking.

The Kuwait Times, our source for the story first published as Kuwait bars DSLR cameras in public places, has retracted the claims on which the story was based. This means we were wrong too. We apologise.

It's hard not to feel a little sorry for Toyota. Over the years the Prius – reviewed here – has not only been a healthy sales success, but the name has become synonymous with hybrid motoring technology.

The Royal Navy's new Type 45 destroyers continue to suffer from technical mishaps, with first ship of the class HMS Daring arriving a week late in Portsmouth on Saturday following emergency propulsion repairs in Canada. The £1.1bn+ ship had previously broken down in mid-Atlantic.

Fifteen years ago, raw technical skill was all that was asked of geeks placed in charge of a collection of computers. That has changed. The diversity of devices and software and the complexity of the internet have conspired to move IT beyond the understanding of any individual. The field has become far too diverse for even the brightest among us to be a true IT polymath.

Researchers claim to have demonstrated how it is possible to move quantum information from individual sets of multi-partite entangled atoms to four entangled beams of light (previously they had only managed with two). In simple terms, this a a big step forward in information science because it paves the way toward quantum networks.

Cloudkick has once again expanded the reach of its web-based infrastructure monitoring service. First, it moved beyond Amazon EC2-like compute clouds and into private data centers. And now, it's pushing into turkey smokers.

Antimalware provider Prevx has sounded the alarm about a serious vulnerability in fully patched versions of Microsoft Windows. It allows attackers to execute malware, even in versions designed to withstand such exploits.

A California man facing criminal charges for modifying his Xbox 360 will not be allowed to use fair use grounds to defend himself at a trial scheduled for next week, the judge hearing the case said in a ruling that could have profound consequences for other hardware hackers.